The Ford Maverick represents the apex of American utility, frugality, and technology. Four doors, like a sedan, but with a truck bed, and can even exceed 40 mpg in its hybrid configuration. Go figure, the people love it. And Ford can’t build enough of them. So, while Ram keeps talking up the potential of a small truck, perhaps to go after that Maverick target market, Chevrolet has been busy launching crossovers. The latest of which is the 2024 Trax small SUV. To Chevy’s credit, it looks great, and promises to start at under $22k, which is just about where the Ford Maverick starts. But it seems to ignore the glowing demand for a new small truck in GM’s home market.
One rendering artist has appeared to protest this decision by rendering has taken things into his own hands, and put a truck bed behind the rear doors of the new Chevy Trax, just as there should have been.
Brazil-based virtual artist Kleber Silva, better known as KDesignAG on Instagram, took the Chevy Trax, and created a pickup truck that would have rivaled the Ford Maverick. Brazil does enjoy a breadth of small trucks in its market – even from Chevrolet (S10) and Stellantis’s Fiat (Strada, Toro). So it’s easy to see where the inspiration may have came from.
General Motors knows how to make damn-good trucks. But it hasn’t made a “small truck” since the discontinuation of the first-generation Chevrolet Colorado and GMC Canyon back in 2012. The second-generation Colorado and Canyon grew to be mid-sized, but nevertheless demonstrated that Americans do indeed have an appetite for sensible proportions, as evident from much of their customer base trading in their keys to an ambiguous crossover for something more dynamic in the form of a truck. The Ford Maverick, meanwhile, shows that Americans are willing to go even smaller, with the small truck turning over on dealer lots in just six days, tallying nearly 52,000 units year-to-date. And if Ford could actually build more of them, chances are that number would be much higher.
